The subject of the central economy has been one of varied opinions within the community. The idea of centralized control over both rare items, and quantity control over more common items of loot is very polarizing. As we look towards the remaining months left in 2014, the team has been discussing our intended goals and level of functionality desired from the loot spawning system, and the central hives' control over it. As the current behavior for the spawning and respawning of loot is a placeholder system and the limits of this form are very visible when observing the current behavior on experimental branch servers we have outlined the following goals for the final functionality with the programming, and design teams:
Control over quantity per server instance for rare / high value items (Eg: M4A1, SVD, etc)
Loot table control per region/area type rather than per building class name
Even distribution of loot economy across the whole of Chernarus
As work moves forward on deploying the intended functionality into loot spawning/respawning, server side stats analysis will allow fine adjustments to the system to be made, and experimental branch updates on a weekly basis will allow us to iterate, and volume/stress test against a large user base. Status reports throughout the remainder of the year will keep people apprised on the progress of this new system. - Brian Hicks / Producer
Chris / Lead Artist
"This week, I'm taking a look at our skybox and lighting settings to see if there is opportunity to improve the experience visually - particularly at dawn/dusk and night. I'm hoping that we will find a way to add the milky way spiral arm visible in the night sky to our game.
Work continues on several new character pieces (women's clothing, prison uniform, medical scrubs, craftable clothing and new zombie types) as well as various environment models which I have mentioned previously (new heli crash site, objects for the NEAF, building signs, other props).
The Derringer, AK74M, AKS74U and MP133 with pistol grips have all been passed to the animators, designers and sound team for their part to be completed. We are still be on course to add 5.45mm ammo and the AK74 before the end of October."
Peter / Lead Designer
"The art team has completed several new weapons and delivered the assets to the animation and design teams. One of these new items is one quite a special case, which we need to figure out how to do properly and it's a flare gun. So in the meantime you will get other dangerous toys to play with. By the way do you remember that little useful item from the mod which was used to heat yourself up? Character exposure mechanics were expanded again and good old heat pack is back and it's better than ever. When you use it, it starts to produce heat to warm you up as long as the pack lasts. With advanced weather impact we had introduced also some meaning for shoes you are wearing. But that wasn't enough for us within scope of the survival. Shoes have potential to became very important part of your clothes to take care of as they are gets damaged now depending on movement speed, surface type and distance traveled and eventually hurts your feet.
Previously, I had mentioned the new controls system which is currently being worked on and we have working prototype of it already. You are probably curious what changes it will brings to game and way it's played. We are focused to make the controlling of your character as fluent as possible so there will be no immersion breaking due to clunky controls. That means we want to eliminate user action menu, or at least have this possibility just for very special cases. Usage of items will be driven contextually, let's say you have an apple in your hand and you invoke action by pressing and holding use button - if you are pointing on someone you will start to feed him while you are holding the use button, if not then you will start eating it by yourself - when you release you will stop the action. You will be able to use items even during movement. Still have that half-eaten apple in hand when zombie suddenly appear? Just hit him hard with that apple in your hand - yes all items (of course firearms too) can became melee weapons. New controls allow us also to expand melee system which we are considering to do with addition of two types of attacks - fast and charged, or to add push instead of fast attack. We will see how the prototype of these goes and how it will play with server performance and synchronization in general.
Next time I will talk a little bit about the new inventory too. As usual apart from such exciting stuff we made some fixes such ammo-box container inception and other smaller ones. I nearly forgot that we spent some time on defining what animal companions should be, but that's something to talk about later.
Choose your footwear wisely... see you in Chernarus folks!"
Standup Notes for the week of 20 Oct 14
(Note: Standup notes are not a change log - they are a quick high level look at tasks the teams worked on throughout this week)
Art:
Improvements to the skybox and lighting
Multiple crafted leather items
Women's shorts, sweater
Polishing bush rag and 3D camo for weapons
Prison Uniform Pants
Medical Scrubs
Steyr AUG
Large Tent
Various new environment models
Animation:
Sitting gesture changes/polishing
Prone animations with pistol polishings
New hand poses for items
Wring clothes animation done
Binoculars animation graph tuning
Bow reload animations in progress
Design:
Bugfixing (tent pitching, repairing leather items, struggling, containers)
Configs and scripts for new items (heat pack)
Shoes and foots damage
Expansion of weather impact
Loot tables maintenance
Damage and destruct textures
Advanced melee
Barricading
Animal companions
Loot distribution
Injured character
Controls
Inventory
Vehicles
Programming:
Critical inventory fixes
Unintenional weapon switching
New gamecontrols
Loot distribution improvements
Gameplay statistics
Door states persistency
Implementation of the V3S vehicle
Zombie/Animal AI